From modular magnificence to myopia and back again

European pharma marketing has a content problem – there’s simply not enough of it. At least not enough to truly personalise customer journeys or build consistent re-engagement on digital channels. Many country marketing teams will have a sales aid they keep up to date, a core scientific slide deck, and a few email templates at the core of what they do each year. Booth materials, events, webinars, and videos will build off these but in total, I’d guess many marketing and medical teams struggle to produce more than 12 new content items a year.

Contrast that to a single consumer advert a past agency of mine created for a travel brand. It delivered 100 different advert variants from one video by pairing it with slightly different claims and calls to action at sizes optimised for each of the 50 different digital channels it was shown on. When compared to manually adapting and re-sizing 100 separate versions of what was basically the same advert the modular approach, paired with programmatic advertising, delivered significant efficiencies.

Another more creative example was for a car brand. The agency filmed over 100 unique video elements that could be combined into 10,000 personalised sequences so that the final advert matched the Facebook profile of the specific person watching. If the viewer had kids there was a snippet showing kids in the car, if they had a dog, it showed a dog hopping in the boot, if their favourite colour was red, the car was red – I mean it was a nuts level of personalisation that highlights a key potential benefit of a modular approach.

In a US pharma setting, when advertising to consumers particularly, you can see exactly how these types of modular approaches can be powerful. Because, for consumers you have a relatively small number of relatively simple core messages that you want to share across tonnes of channels there’s lots of opportunity for efficiency, creativity and personalisation using modular content.

How modular content works in a little more detail

Getting practical modular content is typically built at three levels:

• Components: This might include single claims, references, images, graphs, and video clips etc
• Modules: A defined collection of components makes up a module – so you might have a claim, video, and reference component that creates a specific efficacy module.
• Assets: A final form asset like a TV ad might use three modules with a specific TV header and a footer. A five-second advert on YouTube might use one module with a specific YouTube header and footer. Then on the website, there might be an efficacy page with five modules included.

The more channels you're using, the more efficiencies a modular approach offers because you will use each component and module multiple times. Where the true scope of these efficiencies hits is when you need to tweak a component. This is because when set up correctly a modular system allows that change to be automatically reflected in every module and asset where that component is used.

Modular myopia

Undoubtedly modular content has huge potential to help increase content production in some specific settings. However, it’s rather near-sighted to suggest that it working in one setting, such as direct-to-consumer advertising, means it will work in all pharma content settings.

Imagine the practicalities for European country-level marketers in modularising all their promotional content for HCPs. Just the core HCP sales aid might be made up of 50 modules – each with 5-25 components. Approving just the building blocks means ‘soft’ approving 250-1,250 little bits. And we’re talking about approving those bits without any context, without knowing how they will be combined – all of which makes approvers in Europe very uncomfortable even if they will ultimately approve it all again in final form (which we’ll come back to).

Now in reality nobody sane is going to create the sales aid from the ground up like this – it would be incredibly hard to build a coherent story and it would take forever. They are going to start with an approved sales aid and chop that up. And this is sort of what happens now to an extent. If you want to build an emailer on efficacy you take the sales aid content, adapt it for email, and go straight to creating the asset. And this works perfectly well because the content is only being delivered in two places and the scope for modular efficiency is almost zero when there are just two channels.

Modular misunderstanding

Now some might say that modern pharma marketing uses many channels – not just a visual aid delivered via the field and a few emails. And, OK, maybe we have a few banner ads, and maybe there’s an HCP portal too with branded content on. And if that’s the case then when we need to make changes to claims – as we often do – a modular approach could make that more efficient.

However, my experience suggests this reasonable assumption is based on not quite understanding reality. For example, banner ads are a very specific format where there is very little space for anything, and in Europe they are typically delivered on a small number of sites for relatively short runs. Trying to force a modular approach to banner ads is normally impractical unless there’s a serious media budget.

Mirroring visual aid content on websites is an interesting one in terms of modular content. I think there’s a good argument for having everything that’s in the visual aid available on the core brand website so doctors can self-detail – or continue from a discussion started by a field person. And, potentially a modular approach could be used for this. However, I think it’s simpler just to approve each page of the website (and each page of the sales aid) as a separate or child job bag allowing it to be swapped out or taken down if it needs changing without the need to take down everything else. Effectively delivering the same benefits without any of the painstaking chopping.

Final form

Technically the need to approve all content produced by pharma in its final form doesn’t really affect the value of modular content. Say you are building a set of emails. You select the modules you want to use, combine them, and approve them as final assets. If a claim changes, then you will have to reapprove that final asset before use, but it should be straightforward.

In reality, however, final form approval is a challenge for specifically human reasons. Opinions change, context changes, competition changes, and approvers almost never re-approve even the simplest material without making changes. This reality is an issue for modular content because in order for it to be efficient you have to be happy to use the bits as they are. As soon as you start tweaking pre-approved bits when you put them together the efficiency very quickly dwindles away.?

In conclusion

There’s no doubt that when you have relatively short simple messages you want to deliver across lots and lots of channels with slightly different format requirements (such as social media and programmatic channels) – modular content can support significant efficiencies.

However, where you have lots of complex interdependent messages, delivered via a visual aid, a few emails and maybe a website it’s likely that a modular approach (beyond the basic repurposing done now) will be less efficient than the status quo and could slow content production down even more.

And so, the mildly Irregular, and somewhat disappointing conclusion, is that for most of pharma’s country-level marketing and medical teams’ modular content is not going to help them much in delivering more content more quickly. In fact, without a lot more thought it could make it even worse.